Principal Forward-Deployed AI Engineer

Mastercard; Bray (OK); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard is seeking a hands-on Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to accelerate delivery within Mastercard Services. You will deploy into internal programs, write production code, and apply AI-first practices to unblock delivery and accelerate roadmaps.

Reporting to the SVP of Developer Enablement, you will join critical spikes, coach teams, and leave behind reusable AI patterns and scalable solutions that extend beyond a single program.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on software engineering experience at Principal level.
• Expertise in containerization and orchestration across cloud environments.
• Deep experience building AI-enabled and agentic solutions (LLMs, RAG, agents).
• Broad technical breadth across languages, frameworks, domains, and codebases.
• Strong practices in CI/CD, automation, testing and developer tooling.
• Experience with responsible AI, governance and production monitoring.
• Ability to onboard teams quickly and drive measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Embed into Services product and engineering teams, delivering production-grade code.
• Provide surge engineering capacity during critical delivery spikes.
• Diagnose bottlenecks across architecture, performance, integration, tooling, and delivery processes.
• Stand up new capabilities and transfer them cleanly to product teams.
• Coach teams on AI-first ways of working and knowledge transfer.

Skills

Hands-on engineering

Docker

Kubernetes

Service Meshes

AI & LLMs

RAG

CI/CD

Cloud-native

Automation

Developer tooling

Communication

Leadership

Tools

GitHub Copilot

Copilot Studio

Azure AI

Claude Code

Job description

Mastercard is seeking a hands-on Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to accelerate delivery within Mastercard Services. You will deploy into internal programs, write production code, and apply AI-first practices to unblock delivery and accelerate roadmaps.

Reporting to the SVP of Developer Enablement, you will join critical spikes, coach teams, and leave behind reusable AI patterns and scalable solutions that extend beyond a single program.